West End and Broadway star Rachel Tucker is used to taking a deep breath before jumping from one theatrical trapeze to another– “a net will appear” is her well-tested philosophy - but the Olivier-nominated performer will be on solid ground when she returns to her home city in September to kick off a new ‘I’m Home’ tour of Ireland and Britain.
“I literally cannot wait to spend time back home and sing again on my home turf,” says the Belfast-born singer and actor who is hosting two special shows at The Mac to showcase her album, You’re Already Home, which she launched last October.
The theatre itself feels a little like ‘home’. She has had sell-out concerts at The Mac in the past - Rachel Tucker Live in 2017, and earlier this year was back for one-woman show, Ottilie: A Rehearsed Reading, performing songs recorded and sung by Co Down blues singer, Ottilie Patterson. This time, the songs are all her own; a mix of favourites that “capture the true essence” of what home means to the UK’s longest running – dare we say ‘favourite’ - Wicked “girl in green”.
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“What better place than in Belfast to start the tour – the place where it all began,” enthuses the multi-award winner, best known for her star role as Elphaba, or, as she calls herself, “The Girl in Green”, from hit musical, Wicked.
“There will be a mix of songs from the shows, some Irish Celtic folk, some pop/Americana, and my own personal favourites, including one I’ve written with Irish singer-songwriter, Caroline Kay.
“It’s called I’m Home and it really highlights what ‘home’ means for me – which, corny as it sounds, just means being with Guy and Ben, wherever in the world we happen to be.” (Guy Retallack is her theatre director husband with whom she shares 11-year-old son, Ben).
“We have done a lovely music video too, which is going to be released closer to the tour dates, to go with that song. It features lots of lovely footage of the Northern Irish coast and really sums it all up; it’s absolutely beautiful.”
Home, though, in terms of actual place, became a source of some soul-searching a few years back while living in a “more expensive” and strangely unfamiliar post-Covid New York.
“I thought a lot more about home during Covid and then, afterwards, New York just wasn’t the same anymore and we started to wonder if we should move back to London,” Rachel reflects.
“I had the idea for the album around that time - while performing in Come From Away [on Broadway] which had a big impact on me, thinking about all those people caught up in the aftermath of 9/11 and stranded in Newfoundland, far away from their homes.”
Starring as American airline pilot Beverley Bass (and ‘Others’) in Come From Away – which recently played Belfast’s Grand Opera House featuring her “lovely best mate”, Mark Dugdale – she says the ‘paying forward’ theme also hit home: “That was the saying from the show – paying it forward – and that’s what I want to do more of, you know, helping the next generation of future musical theatre stars from Northern Ireland.
“I am so happy to be patron of the new Alfie Boe James Huish Academy of Theatre Arts in Belfast and any time I’ve been back home, I try to give my time and coach some kids from James’s school. My husband feels the same – he helped direct James’s production of West Side Story last summer. I love it; I love giving back to kids – it’s how I got started in theatre.
“I remember professional actors coming over and helping out at the Lyric summer drama school I attended and letting us see how it was done in real time. We had to be in rehearsals every day from nine [am] to six [pm] every night, even as kids. I think that is where I got my work ethic from. There was a real discipline involved.”
Since first shooting to fame in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s TV talent show, I’d Do Anything (2008), the now 43-year-old, who trained at the Royal Academy of Music, has barely stopped. She may have failed to win the part of Nancy for the West End revival of Oliver! (she was a semi-finalist) all those years ago - “Nancy was the one that got away” – but it set her up for better things to come.
I remember professional actors coming over and helping out at the Lyric summer drama school I attended and letting us see how it was done in real time... I think that is where I got my work ethic from. There was a real discipline involved
— Rachel Tucker
Later the same year, she made her West End debut in Ben Elton’s Queen musical, We Will Rock You – “a baptism of fire, with Brian May on guitar every Saturday” – before landing her definitive role as Elphaba in Wicked, a role she played, she thinks, more than 2,000 times (both in London and on Broadway) over a total of four-and-a-half years. More recently, Sunset Boulevard beckoned, in which she took over Nicole Scherzinger’s Norma Desmond role one night each week for several months.
Outside of theatre there have been music albums, concerts – in late July she was due to sing at the massive Do You Hear the People Sing? live event at the Hollywood Bowl in LA – filming for the fourth series of BBC1 drama series, Hope Street - “That really felt like coming home for me” - and parts in a couple of short film projects.
A belief – almost a calling – that she should “jump and a net will appear” is something she thinks about most days: the words are tattooed on her arm in tribute to her late mother.
“It was my mum’s saying and I live by that motto,” says the still down-to-earth performer who first learned her trade singing as a child on the Belfast cabaret circuit with her father, Tommy (Tucker) Kelly, and sister, Margaret.
Risks need to be taken in “this industry” she insists, because no-one can ever truly put their finger on the elusive magic ingredient that determines whether a show will be a surprise success, as with Come From Away [earning Tucker an Olivier nomination] or close early [as with Sting’s Last Ship - her Broadway debut - which shut after four months].
“I really want to do more of the straight stuff, you know, drama for TV and film,” she adds, Belfast dialect still refreshingly intact. “I did a short film called Prison in Sweden recently, playing an abusive partner in a gay relationship, and I’m filming another film in July - Frayed - playing a director who is another not-very-nice character. It is scary, but I love trying new things and performing in some of the not-so-well known shows, and just seeing what happens.
“You do think, ‘Is this going to work? What is the guaranteed outcome?’ Well, there isn’t one – but if you just go with your instincts and your heart, and some of your head, I think you will land well. Something will catch you.”
